NYC NOW - September 16, 2024: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

New York City's housing agency is funding more affordable apartments than ever but demand is still far outpacing supply. Plus, WNYC’s Janae Pierre and Bahar Ostadan discuss an NYPD shooting at a Brooklyn subway station that left four people injured. And finally, WNYC’s David Furst talks with reporters Jacly Jeffrey-Wilensky and David Brand about their new reporting which finds some former vacation rentals have become homes for long-term tenants.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. I'm Jenae Pierre. New York City's housing agency is funding more affordable apartments than ever, but demand is still far outpacing supply. An annual review of city agency performance finds the Department of Housing Preservation and Development financed nearly 15,000 new units of affordable housing last fiscal year. The city also funded the project. preservation of around 10,500 existing affordable units. Mayor Eric Adams says that's the highest number on record. But a report from the Real Estate Board of New York finds the city needs half a million

new apartments to meet demand. Two people are in critical condition after a chaotic police shooting inside a Brooklyn subway station Sunday afternoon. WMYC's Bahar Oostadon joins me now to share the latest. So what happened, Bahar? Lay things out for us. So yesterday afternoon at the Sutter Avenue subway station in Brownsville, the NYPD says that police shot four people, including a fellow police officer. It all started when a 37-year-old man named Jarrell Mickles entered the station through the emergency exit gate instead of paying his fare, according to police.

Two officers then followed him through the station because they've been cracking down unfair evasion, especially in Brooklyn. They followed him up to the subway platform when they say that he threatened to kill them if they didn't stop following him. A train pulled into the station. He boarded the train, according to police. They asked him to take his hands out of his pockets. According to police, he said no, said, you'll have to shoot me first. Officers then tried to tase the man unsuccessfully, at which point police say he pulled out a knife. And officers, shot him several times. Now, the incident leaves us with, frankly, more questions that answers. Police say in the chaotic process of following this man, they shot a 49-year-old bystander in the head.

They say a 26-year-old woman was grazed in the leg by a police bullet as well. And like I said, a fellow police officer who's in stable condition was shot and has a bullet lodged in his back. Oh, my gosh. I'd like to discuss the response of local officials to all. of this. What is the NYPD saying? And also, what have you heard from Mayor Eric Adams? You know, Janay, the NYPD isn't giving a whole lot of information about what happened here yet. We're asking questions like, why were multiple people shot, including a police officer. We actually got a witness video of the incident, or at least the aftermath, and it appears that two people lying on the ground inside the train were handcuffed. That is NYPD protocol to handcuff a suspect even after

shooting them. But we're asking why was more than one person considered a suspect in this situation? As for the mayor's part, he tweeted about an officer being shot on the job last night without saying that it was another officer who shot him. He was criticized by several elected officials for posting that. And Bahar, what do we know about all the people who were shot? Well, one of the reporters Brittany Kriegstein visited Mickles, the alleged Farivator's mother this morning. She had it been told what happened. She'd just gotten home from her night shift as a security guard to find an NYPD business card at her door. And our reporter, Brittany, had to share the news that her son was shot by police. The mother's name is Gloria Holloway. Here's what she had to say. They shot him at the

train station? So they just shot him and didn't bother to get in touch with nobody who's related to him and leave a car here at the damn door? Police haven't named the bystander. Police haven't named the bystander that was shot in the head, but that man is in critical condition as of today. And the other victim and the police officer are in stable condition. A minute ago, you mentioned that police tried to use tasers to immobilize the suspect. What happened there? All we know from the NYPD right now is that the tasers, quote unquote, didn't work. This was actually the second NYPD shooting in 48 hours where police tried to use a taser and the

taser was ineffective. There was another fatal police shooting on Friday where police tased someone and said, again, the taser was ineffective. Now, police haven't said yet why the tasers were ineffective, whether it was, you know, that nothing actually came out of the taser when it was triggered, whether some, you know, the taser was deployed, but it didn't land on the person successfully. There's sort of a myriad of things that could have happened, and we're looking into that further. That's WMYC's Bahar Oostodon. The number of short-term rentals has plummeted in bedstay, a neighborhood that once had the highest concentration of Airbnb listings in the city. What happened? More on that after the break. New York City has lost thousands of Airbnbs and other short-term rental properties since a local law was enacted last year.

The law blocks payments to Airbnb hosts unless their properties are legal and registered with the city. Now, new reporting by WNYC finds at least some of those former vacation rentals have become homes for long-term tenants. My colleague David First talked with WNYC reporter's David Brand and Jacqueline Jeffrey Walensky about their reporting. Jacqueline, you looked at Airbnb data from the last year. What has changed since the law went into effect? What we found was that across the city, there are about 10,000 fewer short-term rentals on Airbnb now than there were last year. But that's not to say that they're totally gone. A lot of them just changed the listing so that they can only be rented out for a month or more.

So they're no longer short-term rentals, so they're exempt from the rules. We also zoomed in on bedstye in the data because when we checked last year, it had so many Airbnbs before, more than almost any other neighborhood. In the area that we looked at alone, it's about two dozen blocks. There were close to 90 short-term Airbnbs before the rule kicked in, and now there are just 13. That's a big difference. What happened to the rest? So 34 of them did that minimum stay trick that I mentioned. They're now just long-term rentals instead of short-term rentals, so they're not affected by the rule. Four of them did a different trick. They switched to renting out individual rooms instead of entire apartments. That's another way to sidestep the regulation. About 26 were taken off the site altogether. And then David actually tracked down 10 that had been rented the old-fashioned way. He found them on Street Easy.

Okay, so David, let's dig a little deeper here. How did this happen? Is it all because of the new local law? Well, short-term rentals were already illegal, but the enforcement was based on complaints, and so it was often hard to prove. This new law really went for the wallet. It blocks payment to people who are trying to rent their places on Airbnb without first registering with the city. And so it really made it impossible for them to make money on these platforms. Some people, as Jacqueline mentioned, have been able to register or are doing Airbnb for just over a month. And others have made the switch to longer-term tenants. For their part, Airbnb is still pushing back on the laws, especially when it comes to small homeowners. Here's their Northeast Regional Manager, Nathan Rotman.

People should have those kinds of options, at least at minimum, in their primary residence, to be allowed to short-term rent. And that is like a standard law, almost every single major municipality all over the one. world. Rotman says he understands cracking down on big landlords, renting out a bunch of units at the same time, like turning an apartment building into a hotel. But he's hoping city lawmakers will re-examine the rules. Okay, David, what are Airbnb and hosts saying? How are they adjusting? I visited with Frankie Scott, and she's owned her Brownstone on Hancock Street since 1984 and started doing Airbnb a few years ago. She says after the crackdown, a broker suggested she rent to a young couple on a one-year lease for about $2,500 a month.

So you're willing to take a chance? I'm a gambler. So of course. And it's paid all. So I won't raise that rent. $25 is fine. It's a good thing. Scott says she had some bad experiences with tenants in the past, so she was a little

apprehensive. But she says her current tenants pay on the first of every month, and she really hopes they'll stay for another year. I also talked with Michael Keith Davis. He's a real estate broker who also owns a home in bedstay. And he says he's seeing more landlords like Scott renting to permanent tenants. More listings have become available because Airbnb had such a stranglehold on inventory and the market share.

That being said, he does say he knows some neighbors who are missing out on like tens of thousands of dollars by not doing Airbnb anymore. And that's the point that one homeowner group makes. They're called restore homeowner autonomy and rights. They go by Roar. They released a survey last week of members who report losing about. 40 grand on average because they can't do short-term rentals. Jacqueline, can you give us some background here?

Many Airbnbs have been illegal for years, right? Yes, they did flourish, though. They were a popular alternative to hotels because they have kitchens, or maybe they can accommodate larger groups. But the key before was enforcement. It was really hard to track down these illegal hotels unless someone complained about them because they were kind of processed by Airbnb or Verbo or whatever. The trick of the new local law is that it blocked.

payment processing unless the property is registered with the city. And so local law 18, which kicked in last September, has made all the difference as we're seeing in the data. Well, David, let's look at the choices facing New York City tourists without all of those Airbnbs. Are hotels keeping up with demand? Well, listen, you like New York? What about West New York? It's a beautiful little city along the Hudson River, great views of the Manhattan skyline, easy access to Lincoln Tunnel. You know, there's plenty of places in Hudson County just like that.

I see. I see where you're headed here. You know, this isn't a Hudson County Tourism Bureau commercial. You don't have to go to New Jersey. You know, there are, as Jacqueline mentioned, several Airbnb units still on the website. There's places still listed on Verbo, other short-term rental platforms where owners have registered with the city. And then there are a lot of hotels in New York City, of course. A couple problems, though.

There's fewer rooms available because there are fewer people who are doing. these short-term rentals, so a little more demand. At the same time, there's also thousands of people experiencing homelessness who are being housed in commercial hotels. So right there, that's taking some of the supply off the market. That's WNYC's David Brand and Jacqueline Jeffrey Walensky, talking with my colleague, David First. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC.

Catch us every weekday, three times a day. I'm Jenae Pierre. We'll be back tomorrow. Thank you.